Freight is full of tiny ambushes. A quote looks acceptable. Then comes the liftgate, the reclassification, the residential surcharge, the invoice that does not match the contract, and a spreadsheet somebody swears was current last Tuesday. For a midsize manufacturer, the problem is not simply moving a pallet from A to B. It is knowing what happened, what it should have cost and whether anyone has time to challenge the difference.
FreightWise built its business in that difference. The Brentwood, Tennessee company combines transportation management software with people who negotiate carrier contracts, select modes, audit bills, resolve claims and pay carriers. Its pitch is less romantic than most software promises and more useful: put every shipment decision and every dollar on one data trail.
That approach has taken FreightWise from six developers working remotely in 2015 to roughly 160-plus employees and more than $1 billion in annual freight managed across its platforms. The company now spans FreightWise TMS, managed transportation, the acquired Kuebix platform and OnKue, a lighter entry point for smaller shippers. It sits somewhere between SaaS vendor, freight cost accountant and outsourced transportation department.
The man who looked at freight's black holes and decided the first fix was a brighter scoreboard.
The first product was visibility
Cochran had already built and sold a freight software company, TracBack Solutions, before starting FreightWise with Alessandro Rustioni and Richard Hoehn. That earlier run supplied some capital, but more importantly it exposed the industry's “black holes”: shippers often lost visibility after a load left the dock and recovered it only when a bill arrived.
FreightWise's answer was a cloud TMS that could plug into a customer's ERP, warehouse system or order platform. It brought rating, carrier choice, tendering, documents, label printing, tracking and analytics into one place. The software mattered. But Cochran also understood that a dashboard does not renegotiate an LTL contract or chase a duplicate charge. FreightWise paired the product with managed transportation and freight audit from the beginning.
We started in 2015 with a simple belief that technology, paired with industry know-how, can save shippers tremendous amounts of time and money.Chris Cochran, FreightWise CEO
This loop is the company's real product. A pure TMS may stop after execution. A broker may obscure the underlying rate. FreightWise says customers keep their carrier relationships while its team uses pooled volume, data and contract expertise to improve the portfolio. After delivery, the invoice is checked, discrepancies are handled and accounting receives one consolidated weekly bill across carriers.
What the savings actually look like
The cleanest evidence comes from customer work, not marketing adjectives. An anonymized manufacturer of meal-delivery equipment had already negotiated aggressively with carriers, so another rate squeeze was unlikely to do much. Its older internal processes were the first thing to fail: manual carrier selection, disconnected label printing and 500 invoices a week. FreightWise changed the question from “Can we get a lower rate?” to “Can we change the mode, routing and work around the rate?”
The team implemented mode optimization, automated carrier selection and a custom connection for faster label printing, order manifestation and billing. FreightWise then took over audit, general-ledger coding and carrier payment. The customer funded one invoice each week instead of processing hundreds. The reported result was more than $1.8 million in lower freight spend and 4,200 labor hours returned over three years, plus 2 to 4 percent in audit refunds.
Named customers show the same pattern. Aladdin Temp-Rite says live carrier rates inside its own system let salespeople quote freight quickly and allow logic to select the lowest-cost carrier. FreightWise reports average annual savings of 14 percent from LTL negotiation and selection, 11 percent from parcel contract work and 2 percent from LTL invoice audit. Johnson Gas reported 11 percent savings on LTL strategy, 15.2 percent on parcel and 3 percent recovered through audit discrepancies.
One company, four ways in
FreightWise TMS
Multimodal rating, booking, labels, tracking, documents, analytics and integrations for more involved operations.
Kuebix
The acquired cloud TMS, now positioned for small and mid-market shippers that want direct control and broad carrier connectivity.
OnKue
A lighter, tiered product designed to get smaller shippers rating and booking quickly, with a path into the larger Kuebix ecosystem.
Managed transportation
Carrier procurement, supply-chain design, audit, payment, claims and daily operational support, all running on the same technology.
The split matters because the market is not one market. A small distributor may need a usable rate screen by lunchtime. A larger manufacturer may need ERP triggers, APIs, multi-stop truckload, EDI, customized bills of lading and finance controls. A lean logistics team may want FreightWise to operate the whole system. The company can sell software, service or both without forcing every shipper through the same door.
The software marked for retirement
Kuebix gave FreightWise its boldest strategic move. Trimble acquired the TMS provider in 2020 for roughly $200 million, gaining a community then described as more than 21,000 shipping companies. Trimble later planned to retire the product in favor of another platform. FreightWise bought Kuebix in November 2023 for an undisclosed price and promised continuity.
This was not merely an acquihire or a code purchase. Kuebix carried years of workflow familiarity, carrier connections and installed trust. FreightWise kept it alive, won Hunt Advantage Group as the first new post-acquisition customer and launched OnKue with Estes in early 2025. The company says the combined network now includes more than 4,000 users sending tens of thousands of loads each day.
The current roadmap is practical rather than theatrical. In 2026 FreightWise added contracted truckload rates, multi-stop consolidation, EDI support, detailed tracking and new Intelligence dashboards. A FreightSnap integration pulls pallet dimensions and weight into the shipping workflow. Printing improvements claim 30 to 60 labels per minute. Chris Haarmeyer joined as chief technology officer to expand the Kuebix platform and its use of AI.
The model is opex, not magic
FreightWise says its managed transportation offer needs no upfront capital investment. Customers treat it as operating expense, with FreightWise incentivized by the savings it produces. That can shorten a buying cycle compared with a large software implementation. It also explains why the services and software are welded together: the company needs clean data to find savings, and operational access to capture them.
The exact price depends on the account and is not publicly posted. The disclosed costs sit elsewhere in the story: investors backed the next phase with $25 million in 2022, and the company committed $2 million to expand its Brentwood headquarters and create 48 Tennessee jobs in 2023. The Kuebix purchase price remains private.
Buyers should focus less on a headline savings percentage than on the baseline. FreightWise is most useful where a company has repeat shipment volume, multiple modes or carriers, enough invoice history to audit and a willingness to connect ERP or warehouse data. A business with occasional spot loads, little clean history or no appetite to change routing rules will produce a thinner signal. Savings-sharing also needs a mutually trusted baseline; otherwise every improvement becomes an argument about the counterfactual.
The practical test
Can the shipper connect orders, carrier choices and final invoices at shipment level? If yes, the team can see whether a “cheap” rate became an expensive delivery. If no, optimization begins with data cleanup, not negotiation.
A playbook worth borrowing
The most copyable part of FreightWise is not pooled carrier volume. Most companies cannot recreate that. They can copy the sequence that made the leverage useful:
- Start with paid invoices. Quoted rates are theory; settled invoices show accessorials, errors and behavior.
- Normalize the modes. Put parcel, LTL and truckload choices side by side before teams repeat yesterday's routing.
- Automate the handoff. Push orders from the ERP into the TMS and return cost, carrier and tracking data without duplicate entry.
- Audit after the move. The shipment is not financially complete until the bill matches the contract and the discrepancy is resolved.
- Feed reality back. Use actual service, damage, accessorial and cost data in the next carrier decision and RFP.
This is why FreightWise differs from a broker, an ERP freight module or a stand-alone rate shopper. The alternatives may each handle a piece. FreightWise wants the continuous loop. In one third-party case study, a logistics service provider chose it over FreightPop, Freightview and Descartes; the researcher reported $1 million in lower transportation cost, a 52 percent improvement in next-day shipments and on-time-in-full performance rising from 94 to 97 percent. Those results belong to one deployment, but they illustrate what integration can change.
From a bar tab to a billion-dollar freight ledger
FreightWise's internal culture once mirrored its customer proposition with startling literalness. An Inc. profile described employees seeing how their work contributed to revenue and margin. Auditors earned more for catching costly mistakes; data-entry bonuses could fall with errors; salespeople saw revenue against commissions, travel, health benefits and 401(k) costs. “We want to be very open,” Cochran said, so people knew “what's buttering the bread.”
That level of measurement will not suit every employee or every shipper. It can make work feel legible or relentlessly scored. But it explains the company's instincts. FreightWise grew by taking something vague - the true cost of a person, a process or a pallet - and making it visible enough to debate.
Its place in the market follows from that temperament. The largest shippers can afford giant enterprise systems and dedicated procurement teams. Tiny shippers can live on carrier portals and spot quotes. FreightWise has aimed between them, where transportation spend is material but logistics infrastructure is incomplete. Kuebix widened that middle. Managed services deepen it. The result is not simply another screen for watching trucks; it is an operating system for arguing with the invoice before the invoice wins.